Abstract

Heart rate variability (HRV) data from young healthy humans is expanded into two components, namely, the angles and radii of a map of R-R intervals. It is shown that, for most subjects at rest breathing spontaneously, the map of successive angles reveals a highly deterministic structure after the frequency range below about 0.05 Hz has been filtered out. However, no obvious low-dimensional structure is found in the map of successive radii. A recently proposed model describing the map of angles for a periodic self-oscillator under external periodic and quasiperiodic forcing is successfully applied to model the dynamics of such angles.